The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (23 page)

The safe houses were rentals, usually in quiet residential neighborhoods without a big Chinese population. The gang often had to hold customers who had arrived in America but had not yet paid their snakehead debts. They coexisted with these customers in a strange relationship; they cooked and ate and talked with the new arrivals, who often came from the same villages in China that they did. Prosecutors sometimes referred to the practice of holding people until they had paid their fees as “hostage-taking.” But most of the arrivals seemed to think of themselves as debtors who had not yet fulfilled their end of a contractual exchange. They weren’t tied up or locked up; this was one of the advantages of having safe houses far from Chinatown. With no immigration status and no English, if these people fled, where could they go? At the same time, the customers were often beaten and threatened when they didn’t pay; and they were forced to cohabit, often in large numbers, in the basement. Alan Tam always specified to real estate agents that he would need a space in which the basement was finished.

In the months after Ah Kay’s departure, Ah Wong and a few supporters were switching safe houses every few days. They moved so frequently that Alan Tam often couldn’t remember at the end of the day where they were supposed to be staying that night. In the safe houses themselves, life had its indolent, adolescent pleasures. For all the violence and intrigue that marked their lives, Ah Wong and his followers were college-aged kids with plenty of money and a lot of spare time. They treated the houses like crash pads. Various people cycled through—the gang members, their girlfriends, the occasional customer who hadn’t paid a debt. The bathroom at a safe house might have eighteen different toothbrushes in it, accommodating a revolving door of regulars and passers-through.

They cooked and brought Chinese takeout home and drank Heineken in abundant quantities. None of them cleaned, and the trash had a tendency to pile up. They hooked up VCRs and watched Chinese
movies on video. “We watch kung fu movies or drama,” Tam would later explain. They played Nintendo games as well; “Streetfighter” was a favorite. At one of the houses, they strung up a punching bag in the backyard. Some of them listened to English lessons on tape. Neighbors might wonder at the young Asian men with moussed hair and black suits who seemed always to be entering or leaving the split-level down the block, but it was hard to distinguish the kids, to tell how many they were. People assumed that they worked for some local Chinese restaurant.

B
oth the FBI and the Manhattan district attorney’s office were investigating the beeper-store murders, but the Fuk Ching’s decision to go underground made it difficult. Then one day Dan Xin Lin walked in to the FBI office and said he was willing to cooperate. Ray Kerr, an FBI agent who was working on the Asian gang problem, and Peter Lee, the special agent who had debriefed Sister Ping, met with Dan Xin. He seemed nothing like his outsized reputation in the neighborhood, the giant-slayer who had dared to challenge Ah Kay. On the contrary, he appeared thin and meek, almost delicate. But it was immediately clear why Dan Xin had come in: he was furious at Ah Kay. He wanted revenge. Kerr and Lee told him they would round up Ah Kay’s gang and arrest them, but they needed his help. “You don’t need to get revenge,” Kerr told him. “In this country, that’s what law enforcement does.”

Dan Xin sat with the agents and looked through surveillance photos. He picked out Song You Lin, the man who had nearly killed him, and Ah Wong. The FBI agents could see what was happening; it wasn’t unusual for criminals to cooperate primarily for the purpose of getting the other guy arrested. But Dan Xin said he could help them get the beeper-store assassin. From FBI headquarters he made a call to Song You Lin, saying he wanted to meet in Chinatown to discuss the conflict. Song agreed to a rendezvous. The proposed scenario, in which the men would sit down over noodles and have a cordial discussion about the recent
incident in which one had tried to murder the other, was so unlikely that the meeting could take place only if both parties had ulterior motives. Dan Xin had no intention of meeting with Song; he just wanted to confirm a time and a place where the police could arrest him. And Song had no intention of discussing the conflict. He agreed to the meeting so that he could finish the job; when the police picked him up, they found a gun, hidden, after the Fuk Ching fashion, in the backpack his girlfriend was carrying.

The FBI coordinated with Luke Rettler at the Manhattan DA’s office and arranged to take Dan Xin before a grand jury where he could finger Song You Lin and another Fuk Ching member for the beeper-store shootings. They transported him to the grand jury room downtown under guard and closed the elevator bank so that he could travel up without being seen. On the way up in the elevator, Rettler noticed that Dan Xin was shaking slightly; he looked like a frightened kid.

Dan Xin may have been shaking less from fear than from indignation. He had grown obsessed with getting revenge on Ah Kay. Certainly testifying against his assailant in the beeper store would bring some satisfaction, but he was increasingly focusing his enmity on Ah Kay’s brother, Ah Wong. He had provided the FBI with information about Ah Wong, but Ah Wong was not an immediate target in their investigation; they wanted to close the beeper-store killings. Having appealed to America’s criminal justice system, Dan Xin now felt that it was not moving quickly enough. He instructed some of his allies to try to find out where Ah Wong was staying, to study his travel habits. But it was precisely this kind of pursuit that Ah Wong was seeking to thwart by moving around so frequently, and he was evasive enough that Dan Xin could not pin down his location.

There was one vulnerability in Ah Wong’s routine, however, and it happened to be the individual more familiar with the logistics of safe-house life than any other, if only because it was his duty to oversee those logistics. Alan Tam was loyal to Ah Wong, and above all to Ah Kay, but he was also a drug addict, and something of a buffoon. That March
and April, Dan Xin and his crew began socializing with Tam. They met up with him at a whorehouse on Fifty-fifth Street in Brooklyn and offered him crack cocaine. Dan Xin talked to him about Ah Kay and told him that Ah Kay was no friend of his. Tam had been so loyal to Ah Kay for so many years but had never really benefited from all the money that the
dai lo
was making. Dan Xin’s deputy was a young gangster named Simon Lau, who had chubby cheeks and wore round spectacles. Everyone called him Four-Eyed Fish. He pulled out a gun and placed it on the table in front of Tam.

“Alan,” he said, “are you with us?”

Tam was high, and confused, and conflict-shy by nature. He told them he was.

Dan Xin offered Four-Eyed Fish and five other associates $50,000 each to help him take revenge. They visited a gun dealer they knew, a young man with spiked hair and a black leather jacket who worked out of an apartment he shared with his mother, a garment factory worker. They bought five handguns and a Cobray Mac-11 assault pistol, which could shoot 1,200 rounds per minute. At times they seemed not like juvenile killers but like harmless truants, kids playing GI Joe. They all referred to the Mac-11, erroneously, as “the Uzi.” They bought serrated hunting knives and called them “Rambo knives.” The plan was to kill Ah Wong and then torch his safe house, burning it to the ground. They went to a gas station and filled two plastic water jugs with gasoline, then departed on a scouting mission. But they had neglected to seal the jugs securely, and before long they had to stop, because they had all gotten woozy from the fumes.

Tam could see what was going to happen. He told Dan Xin where Ah Wong was hiding out—a safe house in Teaneck, New Jersey, a quiet suburb on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. As the plotters made their preparations, a pile of weapons began to accumulate on a living room table at the whorehouse in Brooklyn. Tam said he didn’t want to take part in the killing. But Four-Eyed Fish threatened him. “Whoever doesn’t go, we gotta do him,” Four-Eye said. Tam reluctantly
drew them a map of the safe house, diagramming the entrances and exits. He would later claim that he had deliberately misconstrued the layout of the house, but it was of little importance; Dan Xin had the address where Ah Wong was hiding. Tam had always had an insatiable appetite for drugs, and in the days leading up to the operation he took whatever he could, trying to incapacitate himself, or at least appear to.

On the evening of May 23, 1993, Dan Xin traveled to the parking lot of a motel near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. It was the last time he would meet with his handlers at the FBI. Ray Kerr and Peter Lee could sense that he had become impatient. But so far as they knew, Dan Xin still didn’t know how to locate Ah Wong. “Remember, if you find out where that safe house is, you don’t do anything. You call Peter,” Kerr told him. Dan Xin nodded.

The next afternoon Dan Xin and the others left Alan asleep at the brothel. There were seven of them altogether. They got into a light blue Dodge Caravan and an Audi that sputtered with a broken muffler. Then they drove north, in the direction of the George Washington Bridge.

T
eaneck is a placid middle-class community of tranquil avenues and subdivisions lined with leafy trees, pruned hedges, swing sets, and small, carefully tended lawns. The house at 1326 Somerset Road was a modest two-story brick-and-shingle place set back from the street and surrounded by hedges and towering oak trees. Inside, a man named Chang Liang Lin was cooking rice in the kitchen. Chang had grown up in a village in Fujian and had left his wife and eight-year-old son and been smuggled from China to Los Angeles. He had arrived in New York only recently, and still owed $33,000 for the trip. Chang had been in the house for a week. He’d been beaten once, but on the whole it hadn’t been so bad. The house was very comfortable by Chinese standards; to Chang, it looked like a mansion.

The house was unusually empty that afternoon; it was just Chang and Guo Liang Qun, Ah Kay’s youngest brother, who was twenty-one
and whom everyone called Ah Qun. The doorbell rang, and Ah Qun walked to the front of the house to see who it was. He opened the door, and several people pushed their way in. One of them was Dan Xin Lin, whom Chang knew slightly, because they had lived near each other back in China. Dan Xin looked angry, and he and Ah Qun began arguing and shouting at each other. Suddenly Dan Xin and the men with him pulled out guns, and one of them accidentally discharged, the bullet lodging itself in Ah Qun’s leg. The boy howled with pain. Two of Dan Xin’s men went into the kitchen and started beating Chang. They took him into the living room, where Ah Qun was screaming, and tied his hands and legs, and Ah Qun’s hands and legs, with duct tape. Dan Xin leaned over them and taped their mouths shut, and the others forced them down into the basement.

The basement floor was cold. One of Dan Xin’s underlings, a sallow twenty-two-year-old named Yun Lin, stayed with Chang and Ah Qun. Yun Lin had high cheekbones and delicate lips. He had just arrived from China himself, and he was kind to Chang. He found a blanket and wrapped it around Chang to keep him warm. He spoke to him and called him uncle, a gesture of affection and respect. Chang lay on the floor next to Ah Qun and wondered what would become of them.

After establishing that only Chang and Ah Qun were home, Dan Xin set out to search the rest of the house. He walked upstairs and began going through the bedrooms, looking for any weapons that might be hidden there. Then he heard the doorbell ring.

A
h Wong had spent the day in Chinatown, gambling with other members of the gang. As afternoon gave way to evening, he and three friends drove back over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey and through the quiet streets of Teaneck. They pulled up in front of the house, got out of the car, and walked up the front path. Ah Wong rang the doorbell, but no one answered. He told two of his companions, Yu Ping Zhang and Guang Sheng Li, to go around to the back of the house.
They jimmied a window and climbed into the kitchen. The house was quiet; no one seemed to be home. They walked through the living room to the entry foyer in the front. Yu Ping Zhang was smoking a cigarette. He unlocked the front door, and his hand was on the knob and opening the door to let the others in when Dan Xin Lin came down the stairs, dressed in black and holding the Mac-11. Yu Ping Zhang was dead before he hit the floor, the cigarette still in his mouth. Before Guang Sheng Li could escape, the attackers were upon him, shooting him in the head and stabbing him repeatedly. Dan Xin may have taken a special satisfaction in this—Guang Sheng Li had been one of the men at the beeper store the day he had almost died.

On the front porch, Ah Wong and the man he was with, Ming Cheng, heard the shots. They turned and sprinted in opposite directions, but the killers burst out after them. They fired wildly at Ming Cheng but missed, and eventually lost track of him. Ah Wong dashed down Somerset Road and cut across a lawn at Wendell Place. But the lawn had recently been mowed, and he slid on the loose grass. The attackers caught up with him and stood above him, pumping bullets into his body as he squirmed on the ground.

Then the killers returned to the house to execute the two witnesses in the basement. Chang heard the shot that killed Ah Qun. But he hardly registered a thing when the men shot him in the head.

A
kiva Fleischmann, who had just turned nine years old, was eating a dinner of takeout chicken with his family in the kitchen of their house on Mercedes Street when he heard what he thought must be fireworks. Akiva and his older brother, Shaya, ran into their backyard. When they reached the curb, Akiva saw several Chinese men galloping toward him. As they ran past, Akiva saw one of the men pause to throw something underneath a Cadillac parked in front of a neighbor’s house. Suddenly a blue minivan came tearing up Mercedes Street from the other direction and pulled to a stop right in front of him. As Akiva and his brother stood
there, frozen, on the sidewalk, the van’s side door slid open, the Chinese men piled in, and in a screech of tires the van did a wild U-turn, then tore down the street and disappeared.